The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning
Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Who’d’a thunk it?
Because you get white eggs from white chickens and brown eggs from brown chickens (*), this one came from a brown chicken with the digital option:
The egg matched the carton date stamp, so this must be an additional part of the process.
Some casual searching shows egg shell printing is a production-line thing.
I suppose RFID-per-egg will eventually be the Next New Thing.
(*) Yes, and chocolate milk from brown cows. Work with me on this, OK?
A recent road trip presented this spectacle in the first Pennsylvania rest step on northbound I-83 (clicky for many more dots, then scroll to see it all):
It’s a 150 Ton Flat and Depressed Well 19 Axle Trailer, including four axles on the front truck:
Another truck on the rear pushes uphill and provides lateral control downhill:
The weight block on the rear truck provides more traction, because friction depends on normal force.
The PA transportation folks were verifying the overall weight and per-axle distribution by weighing three axles at a time:
Each scale has a 20 k pound range:
The ones I saw reported 10-14 k pounds, so figure 24 k pounds per axle, then multiply by 19 to get 456 k pounds overall.
The driver of the lead escort vehicle said the tarp covers a machined steel assembly weighing around 200 k pounds, with a total “vehicle” weight a bit under 500 k pounds. This is the second of four similar loads going from the Port of Baltimore to somewhere in Ohio where they’re assembling a huge press. It seems American manufacturing is still a thing.
They’ll be driving for four or five days from Port o’ Baltimore to Ohio, following a route described in excruciating detail on four pages of notes, plus another 16 pages of permits for the series of bridges rated to carry however many axles will be on them simultaneously.
Some searching produced a video of a similar load in transit, perhaps on the same trailer. Another video shows a different trailer jockeying into position beside a ferry (!).
For the folks involved, it was just another day at the office.
This showed up when I looked at our APRS tracks after a recent ride:
Poking around a bit showed the target:
Contrary to what I thought, it didn’t come up the Hudson River from West Point:
Knowledge of the Universal Law of the Conservation of Perversity informs you a balloon will never land in the middle of a putting green:
Apparently the launch is part of a regular class project at West Point. Good clean fun!
Spotted this on Rt 376 during a ride around the block:
A “Cannabis Energy Drink” without the obvious active ingredient seems like deceptive marketing to me, but, apparently, there was no law against that, even here in New York State.
It’s becoming obvious I don’t get out nearly enough.
A pair of barred owls have been doing call-response “Who cooks for you” chants during the late afternoon, we finally spotted one, and I have a Pixel XL in my pocket:
That’s with the camera zoomed all the way, so it’s blowing up the raw pixels by a factor of four. Cropping out the middle and resizing by 300% shows the result doesn’t have much detail:
We snagged the binoculars on the way out the door, so we got a better look than you do. The camera you have is much better than the camera you don’t, but big glass always wins over tiny optics!
It seems the rodents around here have lost their fear of enclosed spaces:
I cannot be bothered to conjure a mesh lid for the bowl, though.
Back in the day, HP scope probes had a rugged music-wire hook on the tip:
These days, scope probe tips use ordinary sheet steel punched into a hook shape:
By sheer bad luck, the first probe out of the bag had a mis-punched end with no griptivity:
Dunno what happened, but it was definitely sheared off in the factory.
After I finally recognized the problem, I shaped a crude hook with a safe-edge needle file and continued the mission:
A quick note to Siglent put a replacement probe tip in the mail, so it’s all good.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 